The poll accompanying this thread always puts a smile on my face. Before TDKR came out the majority here assumed that it was going to not only out-earn The Avengers but get better reviews as well. Interestingly enough, the same predictions were made about Man of Steel and Iron Man 3. Some people never learn.

Over the past few weeks TDKR has been in heavy rotation on HBO and I have watched it a couple of times. My film criticism professor insisted that it is impossible to fully evaluate any film without multiple viewings, since certain aspects will dominate one's perception the first time out. I have to say, the more I see of TDKR, the weaker I find the film to be. The rationale given by Bane for nuking all of Gotham was laughably muddled. If the city's elite and political power structure were so corrupt, how would killing every citizen, including the poor he claimed to be setting free, improve things? It made a bizarre sort of sense, in a way, because it mirrored the ridiculous reasoning behind having Batman take the fall for Harvey Dent's crimes in TDK.

Most nonsensical of all was the stoic calmness with which the people of Gotham awaited the nuclear incineration Bane promised them. In most cities, people would rise up against the terrorists in their midst in such a situation. As chaotic as Gotham supposedly was, it's safe to assume that many of the citizens were armed. Why wouldn't they rebel against Bane, knowing that he intended to slaughter them all? For that matter, the scene in the stadium was ludicrous since a massive stampede would have been triggered by the implosion in any real sports venue. The sight of Bane's gun-toting henchmen would just have made people run faster; they would probably have been trampled before getting off many rounds. There wouldn't have been an orderly, silent crowd listening to Bane's lilting speech because they would have been long gone.

TDKR is so chock full of badness that I could go on and on. The fight choreography was as bad as any I've ever seen, with neither Batman nor Bane showing any particular skill. The strangely clean sewer cops charging Bane's thugs straight up, running into gunfire without using their own weapons, was just plain stupid. Apparently the Securities & Exchange Commission in Nolan's America is even more inept than the Gotham PD if it couldn't stop fraudulent stock transactions committed during a televised raid on an exchange. And so on. At its heart TDKR was simply a badly-written mess of a movie with far too many logical inconsistencies to be taken it as seriously as it insists on taking itself.